Put on your slicker and turn up your hood, because I’m about to rain on the commentariat parade that has spent the day stomping on Kimberly Guilfoyle, she of the recent break-up with Donald Trump Jr. and subsequent appointment to be our ambassador to the birthplace of Democracy, the country of Greece. Substack columns and Democratic-leaning blogs have had what we used to call a field day making fun of Guilfoyle herself and the supposition that Don Jr. went to his father and asked him to give her something to do that would take her as far away as possible from Palm Beach and Washington D.C.
“Greece begs Guilfoyle to stay in U.S. We can hear her from here,” Andy Borowitz said on Substack, where he now publishes. “So he breaks up with her and ships her off to Greece? I smell a Hallmark Movie” read one post on X.
It’s hard to resist being snarky about Guilfoyle when Trump’s announcement of her appointment includes absurd praise of her “extensive experience and leadership in law, media, and politics along with her sharp intellect,” when the sum total of her actual experience is having been the host of a Fox News talk show. Guilfoyle expressed her thanks on Instagram say, “As ambassador, I look forward to delivering on the Trump agenda, supporting our Greek allies, and ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity.”
Evan Hurst writing on Wonkette, in a withering take-down of Guilfoyle’s appointment, wrote, “Thank God, our long-running war against Greece is coming to an end!”
I confess that my own tastes in commentary often run to snark and ridicule of political figures with whom I disagree and of whom I am contemptuous. Kimberly Guilfoyle is one such figure. Others have recently included Kash Patel, Matt Gaetz, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell and many, many more. Each are laughable in their own unique ways, and I have launched snarky arrows at each of them repeatedly.
An absurd character such as Guilfoyle is far too easy of a target, but she and others like her are what Donald Trump is giving us.
In the election of Donald Trump to a second term in the White House, we have reached a point where snark and ridicule, while fun, are reaching their limits. Some of Trump’s appointments have indeed been laughable. Others, however, are sinister and represent threats to the way that this country has traditionally been governed: with a seriousness of purpose that measures up to the task at hand, no matter the department of government or the issues faced here and abroad.
Donald Trump was not that kind of president in his first term, and he shows every sign of going even more outside the norms of American governance this time around. In fact, with his appointments of right-wing bomb throwers and business cronies, Trump appears to be systematically forming a government that he will systematically loot for his own monetary advantage. He has appointed billionaires to oversee and regulate industries and sectors of the economy in which they hold major investments. Trump and his sons recently established their own crypto trading firm, World Liberty Financial, in which a Chinese crypto entrepreneur has invested $30 million, of which $20 million is estimated will accrue to Donald Trump personally, given the structure of his ownership in the business. Trump’s other son, Eric, has made no secret of his father’s interest in allowing crypto to be traded virtually without regulation, and plans have even been announced to have the U.S. Treasury create a so-called “strategic reserve” of crypto currencies in the amount of $100 billion or more. Investment by the U.S. government in anything is sure to send its value up, this increasing the value of whatever Trump’s crypto holdings are.
The chances for insider trading are off the charts with Trump’s appointment of Paul Atkins as Securities and Exchange Commissioner. Atkins is the CEO of a consulting business that has large crypto clients and is known to be an advocate for what Trump, in his appointment message, called “digital assets.”
“Digital assets,” for those keeping score, are what you get when you take real dollars that you can deposit in banks and use to buy things like food and cars and houses, and instead you buy a so-called “wallet” which contains nothing more than bits of code that is secret, the access to which is secret, the value of which is secret, and which is valued by a market with few boundaries or rules that protect investors against fraud and abuses like ponzi schemes. This description of what crypto amounts to is snarky, but the potential damage to what crypto can do to our economy and to the people who buy its bits and “wallets” is real.
Let us sum up our situation this way: the political and economic and humanitarian life of this nation is already in deep peril, and Donald Trump has not even been inaugurated yet. Snark can help us deal with what we face, but it isn’t going to save us from a man with no morals and criminally defective judgement who will soon have our nuclear codes in the room with him at all times. We can make fun of his hair and makeup, we can speak of the absurdity of his lies, we can point to his conflicts of interest and his obvious greed, we can make a list of the crimes he has already committed and been indicted for and been convicted of, but we must take seriously this man and his array of compatriots and fellow travelers and co-conspirators in the schemes we know he has in mind to carry out over the four years of his presidency. And I will never be able to resist the snark that will flow like the current of the Delaware River every time I consider the fools and knaves who have been thrust upon us.
We will soon live in a time when Donald Trump and his MAGA followers have their hands on the levers of power. We can deploy snark and ridicule to help us untangle ourselves from the dilemma Democracy has given us, but just making ourselves feel good is not enough. Facts leave bite marks. Reason deployed in the service of good has moral and practical power. This is not the end of history. It is the beginning of a profound struggle to ensure that the ideals upon which this country was founded, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, will not perish from this earth.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.
Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.
